My first wired photo

The first time I wired a photo was while on assignment in Bosnia shortly after the war in 1998.  Working with my great friend and colleague Hazel Southam we were sending our story back to the Independent, a British national newspaper and paper of the year for photography.   Getting my photo back was a big deal.  It was a simple story with a serious undertone.  Landmines go on killing for years, long after conflicts have ended.  The rules may attempt to govern the use of landmines but the number of victims still keeps growing each year.  In Vietnam children lose limbs and their lives.  And in Bosnia the entire land was deemed a minefield.  If your vehicle left the road you were to wait for rescue, a narrow pathway would have to be secured after hours of work by trained professionals checking for mines.  Cluster mines were dropped by parachute, chrome balls that kids would love to pick up.  And anti-tank mines were set to explode under a bridge or in buildings where whole communities were gathered to die.  I remember a pile of rubble that was once a church, now it had a cross left on top as a memorial. 

Our story told of British soldiers teaching kids landmine awareness.  We had been on patrol where they were gaining the trust of the locals, who were largely controlled by mafia.  We had watched soldiers training to clear minefields, and a vehicle waiting for rescue after it had precariously left the road.  We had watched soldiers play with the kids.  We had driven for miles through wide planes where shot out tanks were left to rot, where villages lay waste, like Lord of the Rings where evil hoards had taken everything in their tracks.  And villages where no one was left alive – after genocide nothing seems to live, the land seems haunted not just with the dead but with hate and fear and darkness.  Silence broken by a crow, smoke rising from a few of the remaining buildings.  Many were tortured before they died – limbs and hands removed, eyes removed – medieval.  Soldiers driven near crazy after removing remains from a drainage system, piece by piece. 

As a journalist you get to hear people talk.  One soldier spoke of letting rip after getting home.  It should not be a surprise.  We expect our soldiers to release the most primal instinct to kill or be killed and then equally expect them to get things back under control.  Ignorant words spoken against the conflict, where this particular soldier had risked everything, were the trigger to release the rage and pain he held within.  He did not kill this man, but he himself had spoken of being left behind enemy lines and sending radio signals for help that was never to come.  He and his unit are the ones who should be dead. 

Within all this, our story and my photo trying to get back to England, to reach the deadline for the next day.  We drove for forty miles, slow narrow roads where snow had fallen and ice was forming, through the minefield that was the entire land.  The film had first to be processed and then scanned – jpegs were developed for this purpose, to compress a file to be wired home.  The twenty-foot satellite dish kicked out some serious radiation; you don’t go near the dish – and the cost for transmission, $30 a minute.  The first attempt failed after about five minutes.  And so it went, 10 minutes and failure, 15 and failure.  On the fourth or fifth attempt the picture got through.  Would the story run?  Would the photo editor approve my picture?  I had no way of knowing, but as we drove back through the night I remember looking out from the back of the Landrover, it had no seats, just rucksacks for padding and a canvas top flapping in the wind.  Headlights from a stray car shone on the rocks of the mountain road and I wore a simple smile.